A Quiet Life(142)
And so the holiday goes on. It is all as it should be, Laura realises; everyone is so well mannered, everything is so pleasurable. Even when an electric storm comes over on their last day, they go into Annecy to shop and lunch in the driving rain and manage to enjoy the afternoon. When they part, and Mother and Rosa and Laura get back on the train to Geneva, they are all agreed: it was such a good break. They must do it again soon.
The next day she wakes early. It is Monday. Over breakfast, she tells her mother that she can’t go to the doctor with her that day, even though Mother would like her to help her talk to him about the pains she has been having in her legs. She makes up a pointless excuse instead about the new job and needing to go and talk to Winifred. She feels selfish as she says it, but she has to do this now. She drives back up the road to St-Cergue. It is a good choice of theirs, she thinks as she drives. You can see forever, and be sure there is nobody following. She parks the car a little below where they had stopped before, and finds the footpath into the woods. She goes some way down it, holding the camera, and after a while she lifts it up to her eyes. You cannot see the lake clearly here, but there is a glimpse through the trees, a sliver of blue, misty in the distance. She frames the view until she hears footsteps behind her, and turns around.
‘Stefan.’
After all this time. Older, more tired, than ever – he seems to be walking with a limp. If she has been through a lot, what must he have been through? He nods at her, and they walk together. Then he puts his coat on the ground and they sit down. There are wild strawberries there in the grass, below the trees. Laura picks one; it is just a few seeds, a little sweetness, in her mouth.
‘Will you come?’
‘It’s my choice?’
‘You will do it,’ Stefan says. ‘You believe in the revolution.’ Laura does not know whether that is a question or a statement, but she knows those are not the words she would use.
‘Tell me all about Edward – what does he say, how is he?’
‘I haven’t seen him. But I know he wants us to bring you over. He wants to see his daughter.’
There are so many questions that Laura could ask: about what Edward has said about Rosa, what his life is like, is he working, where is he living, does he feel at home there? Is he drinking? Is he with Nick? But it is hard to get your tongue around questions when you are so used to silence, so Laura just asks why it has been so long. Stefan talks about an agent intercepted at the borders, about difficulty in getting clearance in Moscow for certain activities, about a letter that was destroyed when another agent lost his courage. Laura cannot sift truth from lies. She gets up and tells Stefan that she doesn’t know yet, that she wants him to come back tomorrow, same time, same place. It is the first time that she has ever given instructions to him, but he accepts them.
The next day, they meet again and walk a little way in the shady woods. Stefan tells her that he understands why she feels adrift now. For once she feels him trying to be frank with her. He tells her that the stories he told her the previous day were true, but – and here he stops for a while and Laura sees that he is gathering his strength to be more open than ever before – it was only when Stalin died that the authorities became flexible enough to respond to Edward’s request to make contact with her. Laura takes this in, and recognises that her status as the appendage, the wife, quite outside the grand narrative, will never change.
Stefan tries to bring her back to him. He tells her that Edward has been impatient for news of her; he repeats that he wants to see his daughter, and he reassures her that he is not drinking much. Again, Laura cannot tell what is truth, what is a story concocted to persuade her. In the end she falls silent, and lets him talk through the instructions he has been sent to give. She takes notes in her mind, just as in the old days.
In three days, he says. They will keep a tail on her all the time; two men who will alert her if there is any danger. She will drive to Lausanne and from there take the train to Zurich; from there she must take the Arlberg Express, but she must leave it at the Austrian town of Schwarzbach St Veit, where she will be met by a driver. He has her ticket ready. Here it is. Rosa will need no ticket. Just like Edward, Laura must leave on a Friday, and she must give an excuse to Mother and her friends about where she is going so that nobody is alerted until Monday. Just like Edward, she will be taken quickly across the border. Just like Edward, she will be able to prepare one telegram, to be sent once she is across.
‘What if I can’t do it?’
‘If you think someone has broken the secret, you must try to alert our men. Thread a scarf through the handles of your shutter on your bedroom window. We’ll wait a fortnight, and then try again here at the same time.’
As she drives back along the lake to Geneva, Laura is thrown forward into what it will be like for everyone if she goes. To her surprise she realises that she feels excited by the prospect. It is childish, she thinks, like the adolescent who says how sorry you’ll be when I’m dead, but she cannot help thinking of how Alistair, Sybil, Giles, Amy – all the people who made their own judgements, who dismissed her and patronised her – how they will finally know. She thinks of Valance, and is filled with elation when she thinks of winning at his game, of pulling out from under his nose. She thinks of a woman she has not seen for many years, who might read the headline in the newspaper, and might remember an eager girl on a transatlantic crossing, and might recognise the twisted journey she has taken, and why she lied to her and left her so many years ago. She knows she should feel sad about Mother and Archie, and even Ellen, and Winifred, who have stood by her all this time, but at the moment she is unable to think of them. As she thinks of the future, they seem to blur and recede.